Internet eco-hypocrisy is rampant.

May 4, 2009 3:10 PM

Smart mobs. Guerilla media. Protest tweets and blogs. Activists and ecologists wear their internet savvy like a badge of honor. But the truth is, the question of the environmental impact of the internet is very much taboo. Incidents like Al Gore's having to fess up to the power usage of his personal home are just the beginning of a process by which we come to terms with a fundamental hypocrisy: everything needs to be green ... except the internet. Web companies like Google are learning that their business model is not only not environmentally sustainable; it's not even economically sustainable. When the image of internet usage catches up to reality, will there be a new movement of eco-luddites who want to get off the grid?
posted by macross city flaneur (39 comments total)

The guardian article about google does not give a single fact regarding the actual power usage of the Oregon data center (other than an estimate two or three years out).... nor does it talk about it's economic sustainability.
posted by HuronBob at 3:20 PM on May 4, 2009 [3 favorites]

The linked article says that the GOOG has a big data centre near a dam that uses a lot of electricity. And this makes it economically unsustainable how exactly? As long as they keep up revenues of a bajillion dollars a year it's perfectly sustainable.

When the image of internet usage catches up to reality, will there be a new movement of eco-luddites who want to get off the grid?

I think they'll just be part of the existing movement of eco-luddites who want off the grid.
posted by GuyZero at 3:21 PM on May 4, 2009 [1 favorite]

Is the bit about the eco-luddites just an open question, or did I miss the part about anti-internet activists?
posted by solipsophistocracy at 3:21 PM on May 4, 2009

And... a link to "newsbusters.org" about Gore.. It seems to be a right wing hate site... ???

What is this post about?
posted by HuronBob at 3:22 PM on May 4, 2009 [1 favorite]

So um... since Al Gore invented the internet, we have to bring his energy consumption patterns into this? I don't get what Al Gore's house has to do with the energy consumption of the internet.

Though I would proffer that using the internet to collaborate is still inherently more green than the alternative of getting in your car or on a plane to meet with folks from all around the world. How many trees are saved by people reading the newspaper online vs getting a rolled up dead tree in their driveway every morning for a year.
posted by SirOmega at 3:24 PM on May 4, 2009 [1 favorite]

One of the major costs associated with 'the internet' is cooling large amounts of computer hardware. It is worth considering that if you know that you are going to have a room in your new (build) building that is going to be generating a large amount of heat continuously, you can use this to heat or cool the building. There is no need for air conditioning in a well designed building.
The other consideration regarding this component of the economic/environmental impact of 'the internet' is the fact that processors are becoming less energy hungry, even though they are increasing in capacity.
posted by asok at 3:28 PM on May 4, 2009 [2 favorites]

"It uses a lot of power" does not equal "it uses an unsustainable amount of power." Nor does the article linked with that bit about it being unsustainable say that's the case. At all. Nor does Al Gore's home - a private residence for fuck's sake - have anything to do with the green-ness of the Internet. Except he invented it LULZ amirite?

That Guardian article references the money perhaps lost by Youtube - but doesn't break down how much of it is electricity and how much is other bandwidth costs, storage, etc. The article itself points out that the lessons from laptop design are being brought into server farms to keep power usage minimized, and ends with a quote reminding the reader that the Internet saves a tremendous amount of juice too. I telecommute once a week, and the amount of gas I'm not burning by doing that pretty far outpaces the extra kilowatts needed to give me a VPN to log into.

In short: Wake me when you have some real arguments to link to.
posted by Tomorrowful at 3:29 PM on May 4, 2009

Even if we all stopped polluting and dumping CO2 into the air right now, the earth would still undergo significant climate changes. It makes perfect sense to double down with the Internet and hope humanity can figure itself out after it's interconnected.

Also, what siromega said.
posted by Glibpaxman at 3:30 PM on May 4, 2009

...comparable to the Hoover Dam in Colorado...

Hoover Dam is on the Colorado River, but it's between Nevada and Arizona, more than 500 kilometers from the state of Colorado.

The plant siphons off vast amounts of energy from the nearby hydroelectric dam that produces 1.8GW of power...

That would be the Dalles Dam.

...industry estimates suggest that once it is running at full capacity by 2011, it could require as much as 103MW of power to run...

Which is about 5% of their stated generation capacity for the Dalles Dam.

In addition, the Bonneville Power Administration also administers Bonneville Dam (about 1GW), the John Day Dam (2.1 GW), McNary dam (about 1 GW), Grand Coulee (6.8 GW), and anyway I thought that hydro power was green. What's wrong with Google using it for their data center?

This article is a crock.
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 3:31 PM on May 4, 2009 [1 favorite]

This is stupid. The Internet and world-wide computing is a massive new human activity; of course it uses tremendous resources. That is trivial. There is no indication that these resources are somehow not worth it, or "too much" -- that requires a detailed consideration of costs and some accounting for benefits. More importantly, though, this is a distraction from much more serious causes of environmental problems, like agriculture (especially animal-raising), transportation, etc.
posted by grobstein at 3:35 PM on May 4, 2009 [1 favorite]

And isn't the fact that the data center is run off of hydro-electric power indicative of sustainable energy usage? It's not run off of strip mined bitumen or something.
posted by FatherDagon at 3:37 PM on May 4, 2009

Flagged as weird tangential anti-fixing-the-climate noise.
posted by imperium at 3:37 PM on May 4, 2009

Let's play with numbers!

If we assume everyone used the same amount of power as the folks in New Castle (certainly not true, but on average probably correct with in an order of magnitude) then Google is soaking up 0.004% of everyone's electricity.

In other words, 1/25000 of my share of the last few minutes of the world's electricity supply went to making the information I needed to calculate that available. That's like what, unscrew the 40 watt bulb in my refrigerator for a day?
posted by Kid Charlemagne at 3:39 PM on May 4, 2009 [1 favorite]

"Each server burns more watts than the previous generation and each watt costs more". While perhaps this is strictly true, what's the cost -per bit- ? Would the cost per bit not roughly follow Moore's law (halving every 18 months)?

There are probably meaningful comparisons on an energy-cost basis to be made between downloading a movie over the Internet and going to a movie theater. I would love to see them. There is probably no argument about whether the Internet has engendered a whole lot of processing that wasn't done before it existed. Whether it is 'sustainable' or not has meaning only when it's compared with the alternative of -not- having an Internet, and I guess that that comparison cannot be made. Part of the way the world works is about the Internet.

There is something that bothers me about the idea of imposing 'sustainability' piecemeal on convenient elements of what society is - and part of that is the Internet. It is one thing if you trade off Internet communication for what went before; it is another if you say that an explosion of creativity isn't sustainable; it certainly is not but you are better off letting the explosion happen than throttling it.
posted by jet_silver at 3:41 PM on May 4, 2009

Google has a business model?

Oh. You mean that selling ads thing...
posted by Hovercraft Eel at 3:41 PM on May 4, 2009

The whole "the internet uses SO MUCH POWER and is therefore not green" argument always fails because it forgets to take into account the activity the internet replaces. No matter how much power is used to run and view Craigslist, it's still more efficient, energywise, than placing a classified in a newspaper. No matter how much power is used to run Amazon, it's more efficient than the old Sears Roebuck catalogues. No matter how much power is used to run Wikipedia, it's still more efficient than printing encyclopedias. And so forth.
posted by mightygodking at 3:42 PM on May 4, 2009 [1 favorite]

Well, yeah, there's a reason why it's sited next to a hydroelectric dam.
posted by Artw at 3:42 PM on May 4, 2009

And Google honestly won't shut up about their green initiatives.

Green initiatives in IT are a big deal, but flagging Google as a huge offender is pretty much the exact opposite of the truth. I mean, they mow their grass with goats.
posted by GuyZero at 3:43 PM on May 4, 2009

armchair revolutionaries will never stop the struggle to get out of their chairs. whether they succeed, we shall all find out in the future.
posted by the aloha at 3:43 PM on May 4, 2009 [1 favorite]

The guardian article about google does not give a single fact regarding the actual power usage of the Oregon data center (other than an estimate two or three years out).... nor does it talk about it's economic sustainability.

Indeed; however, Google did find me this BBC article which told me "This, said Google, amounted to 0.0003 kWh of energy per search - equivalent to 0.2g of CO2." I also found out that 0.02 kWh of energy to boil a cup of water to make tea. So, about 66 google searches to one cup of tea.

I guess the article's authors will have to forgive me if I don't see changing my internet search habits as the most logical place for my to modify my lifestyle to reduce my personal impact on the planet. I'm going to need to see some more convincing numbers if I'm going to believe "internet eco-hypocrisy" even exists, let alone that it is "rampant".
posted by Mike1024 at 3:45 PM on May 4, 2009

Hey, I'm a grad student in this field! Who wants some actual data?

See this figure, which is taken from the executive summary of the EPA's 2007 Report to Congress on Data Center Energy Efficiency (pdf link). From the summary:

Under current efficiency trends, national energy consumption by servers and data centers could nearly double again in another five years (i.e., by 2011) to more than 100 billion kWh (Figure ES-1), representing a $7.4 billion annual electricity cost. The peak load on the power grid from these servers and data centers is currently estimated to be approximately 7 gigawatts (GW), equivalent to the output of about 15 baseload power plants. If current trends continue, this demand would rise to 12 GW by 2011, which would require an additional 10 power plants.

Here's a study (pdf link) by Koomey at Lawrency Berkeley estimating power consumption of all deployed servers int he US and globally. From the summary:

Aggregate electricity use for servers doubled over the period 2000 to 2005 both in the U.S. and worldwide (Figure ES-1). Almost all of this growth was the result of growth in the number of the least expensive servers, with only a small part of that growth being attributable to growth in the power use per unit. Total power used by servers represented about 0.6% of total U.S. electricity consumption in 2005. When cooling and auxiliary infrastructure are included, that number grows to 1.2%, an amount comparable to that for color televisions. The total power demand in 2005 (including associated i infrastructure) is equivalent (in capacity terms) to about five 1000 MW power plants for the U.S. and 14 such plants for the world. The total electricity bill for operating those servers and associated infrastructure in 2005 was about $2.7 B and $7.2 B for the U.S. and the world, respectively.

This gives you a taste of the kind of studies that are being done. I could give you more if you want.
posted by PercussivePaul at 3:45 PM on May 4, 2009 [6 favorites]

(and I am deliberately refraining from engaging further because as much as I would love to, I have too much to do this afternoon!)
posted by PercussivePaul at 3:46 PM on May 4, 2009

I know my tea kettle and my color TV are plugged directly into a hydroelectric dam, howabout yours?
posted by Artw at 3:49 PM on May 4, 2009

Provocative, although maybe not totally accurate: A Second life avatar uses as much energy as a Brazilian.
posted by marvin at 3:49 PM on May 4, 2009

tl;dr version--

Link 1: The internet uses a lot of electricity!
Link 2: Al Gore is a hypocrite!
Link 3: Google uses a lot of electricity!

Throw in some editorializing, and serve.
posted by mullingitover at 3:50 PM on May 4, 2009 [1 favorite]

1.21 gigawatts? 1.21 gigawatts? Great Scott!
posted by snofoam at 3:56 PM on May 4, 2009

I thought that hydro power was green.

Hydro power runs red with the blood of the salmon genocide.
posted by dersins at 3:57 PM on May 4, 2009 [5 favorites]

A Second life avatar uses as much energy as a Brazilian.

But it uses less wax and is less painful.
posted by GuyZero at 3:58 PM on May 4, 2009 [2 favorites]

Also not as discussable in polite company.
posted by Artw at 3:59 PM on May 4, 2009 [1 favorite]

I think PercussivePaul already got to this, but I went to the good ole DOE U.S. Energy Flow Trends chart and did a quick spot calculation. Assuming that the Guardian article number of 61e10^9 kWh of yearly electrical consumption by U.S. data centers is correct, that accounts for a mere .2% of yearly U.S. energy consumption. The DOE chart is from 2002, so total yearly consumption will have risen since. As the DOE chart points out, we waste much more of it than we actually use. Rather than worrying about the internet, maybe we should be looking at those 30 or so exajoules wasted by our current electrical grid each year and that fat snake of wasted transportation energy.
posted by Derive the Hamiltonian of... at 4:03 PM on May 4, 2009

Google's datacenters are actually very efficient, much more so than the rest of the industry. (This is a huge advantage in the field of serving internet traffic.) It has innovated by using highly efficient power supplies to power its computers, and held a efficient datacenter conference in April where it revealed some of its custom hardware for the first time.

Here is also Google's response to that ridiculously over-the-top (and previously discussed) boiling water claim.

That Guardian article makes a huge load of assumptions, and the poster of this post clearly has some sort of an axe to grind, because there is no mention of how sustainable or not these datacenters are. Google is really doing a lot of interesting stuff in this area.
posted by kdar at 4:09 PM on May 4, 2009

My outrage is unsustainable.
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 4:12 PM on May 4, 2009 [5 favorites]

And it takes an acre of photons->plant matter to keep a human alive.

Yet one 175 watt solar panel about equals the motion->wattage of a fit human.

And the people who believe that human thinking effort is duplicatable in a computer claim that 32 square feet of photons -> wattage will do the job.

So on a photons to work conversion process humans aren't good tools - so I look forward to the NEXT post with the argument to just get rid of people. It'll be like the 1920's promise that excess industrial production would lead to less human hours working. Cept with more people to be idle than the 1920's.
posted by rough ashlar at 4:18 PM on May 4, 2009

I can buy the idea of the Twitter server being powered by a tiny spluttering diesel motor that leaks everywhere.
posted by Artw at 4:21 PM on May 4, 2009

The key to remember is that while the internet may use a lot of electricity, it is replacing far less efficient tools in the process. For example: How much electricity, gasoline, and other resources does a newspaper use? How much has been saved by people not having to go to the library to do research? What are the ecological savings of a reduced load on the US Postal system, to say nothing of international communication?

That's not to say that we shouldn't work to consume less, but my guess is that the internet is already, at worst, a break-even technology, if not an ecological positive.
posted by JDHarper at 4:21 PM on May 4, 2009

I work with a bloghoster and laughed my ass off when we recieved an email asking if we were running our servers on green electricity (she went ahead and stated that she'd seriously consider starting her own blog if we did).

It seems like we can brace ourselves for more requests of that kind.
posted by kolophon at 4:22 PM on May 4, 2009

Nuclear power plants.
posted by hellslinger at 4:22 PM on May 4, 2009

Writing here only to make publicly known my total disdain, contempt and scorn for/toward eco-luddites.
posted by fake at 4:36 PM on May 4, 2009

Writing here only to make publicly known my total disdain, contempt and scorn for/toward eco-luddites.

Yes, they're certain to read it here.

I too have no love for them.
posted by WPW at 4:44 PM on May 4, 2009